From about 1947 when the CPA took the offensive, a ruling class counteroffensive was also gaining momentum. It had its roots as far back as the meeting of fourteen right wing groups called by Menzies in 1944 to found a new conservative party, but it began in earnest with the onset of the cold war. By 1950 the new Liberal Party had a membership of 150,000 and provided the main focus for a rightwing revival. Others included the ALP Industrial Groups, and employers' bodies including especially the bankers and insurance executives. The scope of the mobilisation is most obvious if we examine the struggle over bank nationalisation. This was a co-ordinated offensive by political and industrial wings of the ruling class:

The ALP leadership did its best to facilitate the rightwing offensive, even though it meant paving the way for its own downfall. Victorian Labor Premier Cain had fought the metal workers tooth and nail in 1947, and Queensland Labor Premier Hanlon had used violence against the railway workers. Chifley backed them both, and himself spearheaded the great counterattack which broke the coal strike. He also amended the Conciliation and Arbitration Act to allow appeals over union elections, a provision that was soon used by the right wing to take over the Ironworkers union.

Labor governments, however, dependent as they are on trade union organisation and working class votes, are poorly placed to carry out open assaults on the working class. By 1949 Australian employers had turned decisively to the Liberals and the extreme right to carry out the task.

With the aid of the appeals provisions introduced by Chifley and further legislation from Menzies, making it easier to get court-controlled ballots in union elections, the Groupers were able to displace the Communists in a number of unions. Some of them, notably the Federated Clerks and the Ironworkers, remain under extreme rightwing control to this day. The Groupers even won temporary control of the Melbourne Waterside Workers, and for one year forced the CPA out of the leadership of the Miners' Federation.

The anti-Communist campaign soon expanded into an anti-militant campaign, with anyone who tried to be a good trade unionist as fair game. Ultimately as the Groups gained in strength they began to campaign against anyone who would not support them, an orientation which Santamaria made quite explicit:

By 1951, with the unions greatly weakened by this onslaught, Menzies was ready to hit them with legislation imposing severe penalties for militant action. These were the notorious Penal Powers which hamstrung the more militant unions to a considerable degree, until they were effectively defeated by the Clarrie O'Shea strike of 1969.

Finally the Federal government used economic policy to weaken the union movement by increasing unemployment:

The ruling class offensive was successful in its main objectives. Union militancy declined markedly after 1950. Strike days lost, which , had been about two million in 1950, fell to under 900,000 the following year and remained around a million for the following period. Labour's share of the national product fell dramatically during 1952, and stabilised at a level about four percent lower than before the recession of that year.

The success of the ruling class offensive was fairly central to laying the basis for the postwar economic expansion and political conservatisation of Australian capitalism. The rate of exploitation was raised, and a climate of reaction was created in which trade unionists felt powerless. Politically the rule of the Liberal Party was established for over two decades.

Simultaneously there was a quite specific campaign against the Communist Party, waged on many fronts.

Another pathetic attempt was made to frame prominent Communist Ken Miller on a charge of molesting a little girl, but the case collapsed ignominiously when the girl admitted under oath that she had been put up to making the charge.

The campaign against the party reached its climax with Menzies' attempts to ban the CPA altogether. He first introduced a bill to that effect, only to find it held up in parliament for a time by the Labor-dominated Senate, then later ruled unconstitutional by the High Court. He called a double dissolution to remove the first obstacle, then called a referendum with the hope of overcoming the second. Australians would vote on 22 September, 1951 on whether the Communist Party had a right to exist.

The CPA had taken the threat of illegality very seriously from the start. They had gained some experience in underground work during the war and now proceded to make use of it. A number of party leaders went "into smoke" to avoid likely arrest, a Comintern document on illegal work appeared in the Communist Review, and the Review itself ceased legal publication for a time. Four illegal issues, on a trial basis, were published by the "Henry Lawson Press" supposedly operating out of Eurunderee, NSW.

Attempts were made to consolidate and "purify" the membership. Members whose political affiliations were not publicly known were sought out to provide accommodation for Communists who had to stay clear of the authorities.

The most important allies were to be found in the Labor Party. Evatt, who followed Chifley as leader, had decided by 1951 that if the CPA could be banned, the same measures could be used against the ALP. The Federal Executive of the Labor Party voted by eight to four to oppose the referendum, and Evatt threw himself into a vigorous campaign, warning:

The ACTU voted to oppose the most objectionable of Menzies' proposals, and indicated its unease about all of them. A broad spectrum of intellectuals and public figures stated their opposition, and a Democratic Rights Committee held a rally of 2000 in the Melbourne Town Hall. Above all, the Communist rank and file threw itself into the struggle. Letter-boxing, painting slogans, stuffing envelopes became a day and night activity. Even the football grounds were leafletted. And no wonder. John Sendy has recalled the grim future which party members felt might be in store for them:

Internal Factors in the Party's Decline

HOW HAD the party fallen so far so fast? Repression of course is part of the explanation, but it does not seem enough to explain the severity of the setbacks, for a communist organisation is supposed to be able to face repression. The period of setbacks after mid-1949 revealed a number of serious weaknesses within the CPA which had laid hidden beneath the surface.

Retreat is a more complicated and difficult exercise than taking the offensive. All sorts of new and, for those accustomed to militant action, distastefully slow and unrewarding areas of work have to be entered. Above all, reality has to be looked squarely in the face, and the need for retreat fully accepted. But the party found it hard to accept reality, and was ill-equipped for the complexities of retreat.

This idea was applied to trade union officials in similar measure. Every effort was made to turn Jim Healy and Ernie Thornton into folk heroes. The thoroughly elitist nature of the cult emerges best from the passage in John Morrison's novella Black Cargo, in which the Communist union official Manion is pictured looking at wharfies in the pub:

The personality cults were backed up by the use of pseudo-Marxist "science" to dazzle the naive. By "science" was meant a kind of absolute truth which was the property of the experts. Zelda D'Aprano no doubt expressed the feelings of many when she wrote:

Elitist attitudes went hand in hand with undemocratic practices in the party and in the unions. That is not to say that party conferences were not formally democratic. It is sometimes imagined that the Communist Party was an armed camp with whip-wielding commissars, but in reality the mechanisms of control were normally relatively subtle. Rather than a reign of terror, there was often a reign of speechifying, with all the top leaders making lengthy reports which pre-empted any serious discussion. Anyone bold enough to disagree was as likely to be attacked by the membership as by the leaders, as one activist remembers:

A similar pattern emerged in the unions, with drastic consequences in some cases. When CPA officials were defeated in union elections after 1949, Ted Hill found himself forced to record the reaction of the rank and file in these terms:

In an attempt to save themselves from the challenge of the Industrial Groups, Communist officials sometimes resorted to ballot-rigging. Daphne Gollan, who worked in the office of the Ironworkers union, has confirmed this fact and explained the elitist justification which was advanced:

The elitism and bureaucratism in the unions led to setbacks for two basic reasons. First, they discredited Communists in the eyes of the rank and file and gave ammunition to the right wing opposition. Second and probably most important, they demobilised the militants who were the party's own base, or at least discouraged critical thinking and imagination among them  qualities that are especially important in a period of retreat.

Nothing about the appalling manipulation by Communist union officials; no assessment of the internal life of the party. In fact, the scapegoating of Blake and Henry could only make the real problems worse. It could only reinforce the authoritarianism of the remaining leaders and make middle cadres wary of taking initiatives. As for the substance of the criticism  the attacks on ultraleftism and sectarianism  it only paved the way for an increasing conservatism and timidity in party work, including in some cases a positive fear of industrial militancy.

The focus on unity which arose with the struggle against the attempt to ban the party found its reflection in the practice of running "unity tickets" for union office. These were joint tickets of Communist and Labor Party supporters with policies based on the lowest common denominator. Care was taken to avoid initiatives that might alienate ALP officials, and to avoid excluding them from leadership in unions where the CPA was strong. By this means the party rapidly regained its strength in the union bureaucracy so that by 1958 it had won back most of the ground lost since the forties. But at what price?

It is instructive to note that while party membership grew for a time in the mid-fifties, it by no means grew as quickly as the party's bureaucratic union strength. And it fell again after 1956 without substantially affecting that hold on official positions. There were two factors at work here. On the one hand, a combination of increasing prosperity, the defeat of the left offensive of the late forties, and the sustained ideological and legal onslaught from the right had reduced both the urgency and the appeal of radical politics in the eyes of many workers, while militant trade unionism around economic issues still offered tangible rewards. Workers might therefore elect Communist officials who were seen as effective union leaders, without being interested in radical politics. (To be sure, many workers had always adopted this attitude, but postwar conditions were designed to intensify the problem.)

At the same time, it seems clear that the CPA was now winning union positions not by distinguishing itself from the ALP officials, as it had generally done in decades past, but by merging into the mainstream. This might win union jobs, but would not provide workers with any reason to join the CPA. But if the numbers of the officials grew, without a corresponding growth among the working class rank and file, that could only mean that the party's industrial work would be increasingly dominated by the bureaucrats, with a consequent tendency to conservatise the work.

The consequences have been well summarised by Jack Mundey, who in 1970 described the postwar union work of the CPA in these trenchant words:

It is worth discussing one specific example of what this style of work meant in practice. Vic Williams, then a power worker, got together with a few other Communists to set up a shop committee at Melbourne's Newport power station. They were "practically begged" to set it up by the workers, and were soon able to contact other stations and establish shop committees in them as well. After a prolonged agitation about the fact that wages were lower among these workers than their counterparts in NSW, the stage was set in 1961 for a 24 hour strike. The strike would be illegal but it was obvious that the militants had mass support. "Prior to that," says Williams, "there was a sort of Communist leadership in the SEC but all it did was make pronouncements. . . They were so afraid of ilie SEC. ..." But now this section of the working class, previously neglected by the mainstream union officials, was about to enter a major struggle, with the Communist Party on the ground floor, after two years ot work by its members. How did the party leadership respond?

And the strike did go ahead against the desires of the CPA leadership, setting the stage for a historic period of militancy among Victorian power workers that culminated in the 1977 Latrobe Valley strike. But the party leaders would have stifled it at birth.

Turning Inward

IN A PERIOD of defeat, the greatest danger is that the activists will turn inward. It is hard to talk to non-Communists, and tempting to spend all your time talking to comrades. From here it is only a short step to bitterness and contempt for other people. This is the road to sectarian isolation, and not a few Communists travelled it, as Jack Blake made clear as early as 1951:

Blake was writing about the late forties, when things were polarised but at least the left was winning some victories. How much worse these tendencies must have become in the early fifties! The passage suffers from the usual CPA leader's habit of placing all the blame on the rank and file, but it is insightful nonetheless.

If members were evading the political struggle, they had some good reasons. The wages struggle on the job was something Communists could agree about with fellow workers fairly easily, and they could even win support and popularity among other militants on this account. Getting a hearing for Communist politics was far more difficult. Winning an argument about the merits of Soviet Russia was well-nigh impossible, except in isolated left-wing bastions like the Seamen's Union. But even the Peace Movement propaganda, which had a moderate language and popular appeal, did not excite much real enthusiasm in a working class battered by a series of defeats.

After a period of frustration, many Communists began to turn bitterly inward. An internal party document of the time offers a graphic account of their sentiments:

(There is) a lack of faith in the strength and potentialities of the Australian working class and the Communist Party. "They (the working class) will not accept Socialism  they may in the distant future after the capitalists have kicked their guts in."

Having turned away from the masses, the next step was to leave politics altogether. The internal document indicates quite bluntly how many comrades were tempted to do just that, quoting members' statements as follows:

The party was also pervaded by paranoia, and understandably so. Communists faced one witch-hunt after another, were often victimised at work, and found their children being harassed. Frank Hardy's account in The Hard Way of the repression and harassment he faced while writing Power Without Glory is only a somewhat more spectacular version of what others faced. But while the Communists' fears were understandable, a fascination with security could only hamper recruitment. Potential members were not likely to feel comfortable in a party that was constantly looking over its shoulder, and branches often approached potential recruits with more suspicion than enthusiasm.

In 1956 W J. Brown went so far as to say that the fear of spies was hurting democracy in the organisation, because whenever someone raised a critical viewpoint, "Very quickly some party member suggests there might be more behind such criticism than meets the eye..." Brown pointed out that in fact the best guarantee of security is free political discussion:

Given the setbacks and problems, however, it is remarkable how many Communists survived the cold war with their confidence in socialism (of some kind) and the working class intact. Unfortunately, they often did so at the cost of a retreat into blind and dogged faith, a process which the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci once summed up very well:

This "mechanical determinism" is an expression of perseverance and dedication and so contains a healthy element. But for cadres forced to live with it for two decades, it inevitably leads to permanent distortions: they get in the habit of thinking in terms of slow, gradual change. In the late sixties, when both students and young workers produced explosive struggles and were bursting with anger and impatience, far too many Communists, shaped more than they realised by the years of downturn, responded with annoyance at these ignorant youngsters who didn't understand that "things take time".

Such pronouncements produced a remarkable sort of behaviour among the membership. Some members no doubt simply laughed them off, and a number of others tried to act on the basis of them. The majority, however, inevitably became schizophrenic: in one compartment of their mind they accepted them, believed them, and would even sometimes defend them heatedly; at the same time, they did little if anything about them. They were articles of faith, not perspectives for action.

Still a Major Force

OF COURSE we must not overstate the case. For all the setbacks both in numbers and in consciousness., the Communist Party remained the most important organisation outside the ALP promoting progressive and radical causes, and was still able to do so on a large scale. In fact, considering the conservatisation of most of society, its role became perhaps proportionately more important. And its members were involved  indeed the moving force in  a great many activities.

A World Peace Council had been formed in Paris in 1949 after a meeting which attracted 2000 delegates, and by October of that year there were committees in 70 countries. In Australia a peace organisation was relatively easy to establish, as a section of its natural constituency among intellectuals and clergy was already more or less organised. These were the groups that had campaigned for free speech and the right to use public halls for various leftists. Many of their members moved directly into the peace movement.

The movement held its first Peace Congress in April 1950 featuring Dr. Hewlett Johnson, the "Red Dean of Canterbury" and author of The Socialist Sixth of the World as guest speaker, Hewlett attracted crowds of ten thousand people to the Melbourne Exhibition Building twice in one week and the organisers raised £10,000  a lot of money in those days. Two years later the Eureka Youth League, youth section of the CPA, and other organisations sponsored a Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship, which became a centre of controversy when Menzies refused to allow the Chinese delegates to enter Australia. But despite or perhaps because of such official opposition, the Carnival was a massive success, attracting 2,364 participants and crowds as large as 30,000.

These successes were achieved, moreover, despite proscription of the movement by the Labor Party. After the split with the Groupers in 1955, Labor moved back toward the Left and it became possible for peace organisations to make new overtures to ALP members. To this end the movement was reorganised, both to get around the proscription and to present something of a new face to the world. A Congress for International Cooperation and Disarmament was held in Melbourne in 1959, and leading Labor and union personalities were induced to attend. This ought to have been the beginning of a new period of growth.

Yet the older movement had its importance. At a time when the world seemed to be moving rapidly toward nuclear war, and the cold war atmosphere was being used to erode civil liberties, the peace campaigns undoubtedly represented an important check on the Menzies government. In the 1980s, as a new mass movement against nuclear weapons emerges internationally and in Australia, it becomes especially important to look at the political lessons of these experiences. Unfortunately, the peace movement of the 1950s reflected all too clearly the Communist Party's drift to the right.

The central political thrust was multilateral disarmament: "For a Pact of Peace Between the Five Great Powers".[51] The world's ruling classes would somehow, under pressure from their populations, agree to eliminate war. Unilateral disarmament, the slogan which lent such a radical cutting edge to the disarmament movement in Britain, was never seriously considered in Australia. Had it been, the CPA would undoubtedly have seen it, as did its sister party in Britain until very late, as upsetting the orderly progress of big power negotiation. Nor did the Australian peace movement have any class politics: there was a clear assumption that only lunatics could favour nuclear bombs, and that all the people of the world bar a few evil conspirators could therefore be united against them. "All the women in the world want peace, and... a thousand million women can't be wrong." [52] In consequence the peace propaganda was often remarkably insipid. One could not, of course, expect the Communist Party of the fifties to have more than a dim recollection of Lenin's viewpoint:

This rather passive quality in the propaganda went together with a certain fascination for petition campaigns  the most passive form of political expression. Of the eight million signatures collected for the Vienna Peace Appeal internationally in 1954, Australia contributed 300,000. One man, W.J. Ross, made his run for the Guiness Book of Records by collecting 6000 all by himself. Unfortunately, unless there is some form of struggle, such expressions of public opinion do not overly impress the power brokers of the world, although they do manage to consume the energies of countless activists.

A second political problem was the implicit pro-Sovietism of the movement. The peace organisations contained large majorities of non-Communists, but between the superior organising ability of the CPA and the naive illusions cherished by their liberal allies about the "socialist camp", the peace organisations nevertheless clung to the belief that the western powers were the only threat to peace. While it was undoubtedly correct for the peace movement to direct its concrete agitation against western nuclear weapons  since it was operating in the west  the uncritical attitude to the Russian bomb and to Russian

policy in general was a drawback. It meant that rightwing charges that the peace movement was only a trojan horse for a foreign power appeared plausible to many people, and after the events of 1956 it also cost the peace organisations the support of some activists.

In the work among women many of the same political features emerged. Here too, we must emphasize at the start that the Union of Australian Women, formed after the decline of the New Housewives' Association and noticeably less militant, was nevertheless far in advance of any other group of women in Australian society at the time. They carried on the battle for equal pay and other aspects of women's rights in a society that was increasingly hostile. They demonstrated in the face of police repression and published magazines that took up such issues as women's rights at work. Yet little could be achieved in these areas for some time, and for the majority of the membership there was a retreat into charitable work, making sandwiches for the school canteen or raising money for nurseries.

"Nearly every UAW woman was a member of a mother's club, if they had children," says one of the longest standing UAW activists. Nor would we want to suggest that such work is wrong in principle: communists must be prepared to work just about anywhere in a difficult period. But the effects of a decade or more of luncheons and charity work on the spirit and consciousness of Communist women must have been deadening; worse, it came to be seen as the normal way for Communists to operate. And when in the late sixties and early seventies, women really did begin to be radicalised, the new Women's Liberation movement simply by-passed the UAW, which could not cope with the new style of work and new attitudes toward politics and personal life. The same activist remembers:

The CPA also put a lot of effort into establishing trade union women's committees, more or less on the model of the Miners' Women's Auxiliaries. These committees helped to inform wives of the principles of trade unionism and about their husbands' work experiences, for example by organising workplace tours. Sometimes they mobilised them for strike support. All too often, however, they remained largely in the role of "hewers of cake and drawers of tea", or engaged in charitable activity designed to ease the loneliness of seamen's wives or help the children of strikers.

However, to the extent that Communists found themselves trapped in relatively passive and apolitical roles, the work among women became part of the trend toward stagnation, conservatism, and ultimately accommodation of the party to mainstream Australian life.